Sonia taught me how to be a human being again. She made me eat with a knife and fork, seated across the table from her. I’d eaten out of slop buckets so long I accidentally poked the fork into my cheek until it bled. “See what you’ve made me!” I yelled, but she just laughed, told me to do the dishes. I cleaned the house, wondering how many pigs she’d had before me, but when I was finished she opened a bottle of banana wine. After we’d drunk it she made me come to bed with her. It seemed I was still a human being in at least one respect, but I wasn’t quite sure I’d passed the test, as it never happened again.
I tried to run away one night but Polaris woke up and made such a noise before I’d cleared the garden. Sonia tied me to the bed that night and for a week after. I counted pigs to fall asleep.
After two years she told me I could go.
“Where?” I asked, really not knowing.
She laughed and said, “It’s not the ladder that broke your mind, but the villagers’ beatings. Still, you’ll survive, even heal. In three weeks you’ll go home.”
“The ladder?” I asked. “I never told you about the ladder. You’ve been up there too?”
“Of course. Once you’ve been up it shows, others can see it.”
She asked me to tell her my story. Night after night we drank guava wine and talked. I told her about life in our village, a coastal fishing village as hers was a mountain one; my months with you; the secrets you’d taught me; the yellow mist that enshrouded our camp the last night we spent together, and into which you vanished.
“Be careful of ignorant villagers,” she said. “They ruined your memory, but I’ll give it back.” She blew into my mouth and I said, “I remember the wind too, that peculiar wind on the plateau that sucks the spirit out and then blows it back in. I remember my grandfather. When I go home, will everyone I know have died too?”
“You mean like this?” she asked, and sucked in her cheeks, her eyes suddenly black and shiny, irisless.
“Stop,” I yelled, before she could inhale the whole room, myself included. She laughed and blew me out again. I ran to my room to pack, bolting the door. She knocked, but I wouldn’t let her in.
Sonia bought me a horse to make the trip. “Can you talk horse too?” she asked, making fun of me.
“Horse? I didn’t think horses could talk.” Yet it was true, in spite of my failure with Polaris, after trees and stones and stars anything still seemed possible.
“Don’t say that around him or he’ll be insulted.” She whispered something in the horse’s ear in a low guttural voice and the horse turned and looked at me, his eyes too that shiny dangerous black, like haematite, like obsidian.
“Sonia, please.” I turned away, hiding my face.
“Animals aren’t slaves,” Sonia said. “They’re working for us for a while. They can quit anytime they want. We have to pay them for their work, like we pay anyone.”
“You don’t seem to have the same respect for people,” I grumbled, but Sonia rolled her black eyes at me, said, “You pay animals by listening. Pay attention to what they say.”
“I wanted it over, all this listening. I’m frightened of madness.”
“You’ll hear the voices all your life; they’ll never be gone. Don’t throw away gifts; very few can hear animals, plants, stones.”
“It’s not insanity?”
“Can be,” she said, weighing me with her eyes. “Doesn’t have to be. A choice.” Her eyes weighed and weighed. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.” She gave me a hand mirror she’d made herself, framed in silver. “Look at your eyes, and tell me if you still fear me, your horse.”
I took the mirror and looked, already knowing what I would see. Black. Shiny. Irisless. That was the moment I knew I’d forever be among those who know too much.
I took the horse and bags full of goods for trading. For my two years of indentured semi-slavery Sonia gave me a present she’d made in secret: a set of silver cutlery with stars on the handles for my house in town. She was as good a silversmith as a fisher woman. Stars, in memory of Polaris.
Sonia told me my horse was called Slipstream. “What’s it mean?” I asked.
“A little joke about time. Remember what happened to your grandfather? Be nice to Slipstream or he will, and then where will you be?”
“Rather, when?”
“Good question. Be nice to him if you want your friends still alive when you get home,” she laughed. “It’s not only your grandfather’s stone who knows how to play cat’s cradle with time.”
With this warning, bursting saddlebags, and food for the trip I was ready. Sonia said she’d take me part way down the valley and as we passed through the village proper people came out to watch us. They bowed and called me Mr. Salmon Woman, but I saw them snicker behind their cloaks. I’d earned a new name for my stay but not much more in the way of their respect. At least they didn’t drool at me, their eyes brimming with violence any more, wanting to take me home and beat the magic out of me. Perhaps they thought they’d made a mistake about me. I’d never spoken to one of them.
Strange how the leaves fell in that village, red and yellow, piles of them. It was nearing the end of the dry season; we’d planned our trip to avoid the coming rains. The old men came out, wearing hoods against the damp, to rake the leaves into piles where they were burned. In the market we bought a donkey to carry some of Slipstream’s load. Sonia had asked me to return, after the rains were over, with goods from my seaside village, said she’d pay me in silver, in secrets. The coastal villages had never traded with the mountain people before. Sonia said it was time to begin, and I thought perhaps she’d learned something from me after all.
Children ran under our feet, through the little yards that faced the square. Under those red trees Sonia and I were married. I have never felt sadder than at that moment. “Alia was your heart,” Sonia said by way of marriage vows, “but I am your mind.”
Before we left the village we saw a little girl, drawing designs with chalk in the cracking pavement near the bonfire. She seemed different than all the others, playing with an ardent freedom I’d sensed in no one else. She didn’t seem tight and narrow, closed against strangeness, against hope. Like Sonia, she too brimmed with secret knowledge but it was innocent; she hadn’t been hurt by it and their was no concomitant cruelty in it yet. I left Sonia’s side to go and speak with her, but without warning, one of the hooded old men seized her and threw her into the bonfire. I ran forward to pull the child from the flames but it was already too late. She’d burnt quickly, and silently, making no cries, not struggling, and not smelling of burnt flesh either. I cried but hid my tears in the hood that I too now wore. The men stared, and began to encircle us, their brooms and rakes, cluttered with red and yellow leaves, raised menacingly. Sonia drew me towards her, throwing half her cloak around my shoulders to show I had her protection. It wasn’t enough, however, and it was only when my wife made that trick with her eyes and threatened to breathe them all in, only to exhale them forever changed, that they let us pass, whispering and rustling like leaves as we left them behind. I half imagined they said they wanted to come with us after all, see the outside. We walked very slowly out of the square, and onto the one road that led out, to safety. Bears, wild pigs, what could frighten me now?
We began the slow trek down the mountain to a town I no longer believed existed. The pig pens had burned away the memory of my white house, of that sea wind blowing through. So much for my wife being the restorer of memory, but perhaps it was only certain forgotten moments she could bring back, and not the forgettings she’d occasioned herself. We are all fallible.